Week 7 BOC: Privacy issues on the Web - Two Companies that can Spy on You

Week 7 BOC: Privacy issues on the Web - Two Companies that can Spy on You

Week 7 BOC: Video Challenge

Week 6 BOC: Parking Panda

www.parkingpanda.com - “Have a driveway or other parking spot? List it for rent and let it earn you extra cash whenever you're not using it. Set your spot's price and availability to suit your schedule, and change this anytime. We'll notify you whenever someone books your spot, and a check will be on its way to you! Parking Panda users are daily commuters, concert-goers, art aficionados, foodies, shoppers, and most importantly Ravens and Redskins fans. Everyone needs parking. We have stringent standards to verify that every user of our site is a real live person (or panda) with up-to-date contact info on file so that we can ensure every transaction goes smoothly.”
www.techcrunch.com - “The other part involves working with parking garage owners in major cities on yield optimization for their own empty spaces. When lots are empty, garages can massively discount the lots to fill them up. When the lots again approach full, garages can begin to charge more. As for which model dominates, it depends on the time of the year. As co-founder Nick Miller told us, when Parking Panda launched its beta in Baltimore, it arrived during football season. At the time, around 70% of its bookings were via the so-called “collaborative consumption” model where individual space owners would rent out their spaces to other drivers. After football season ended, however, the garages began to dominate, with individual space owners’ rentals dropping to 15%-20% of company’s total bookings.”
www.mashable.com - “The startup has raised an undisclosed amount of funding and is still in the process of raising more, Miller tells us. Parking Panda has helped more than 1,000 people park in Baltimore, he adds, and has recently begun working with parking garages to increase its inventory. ParkWhiz, another online startup in the parking space, focuses on helping people find parking in major commercial lots.”

Week 2 BOC : Instagram

Social Media has taken over our lives. One way we know this to be true is that Facebook.com has over 300 million subscribers. Since the Internet is always changing, it is important for a company as large as Facebook to keep up with the times. On April 10,2012, Facebook acquired Instagram for $1B, and for good reason. Facebook is known for being a place where you can put pictures of you or whatever you want, onto your own personal web-space for everyone to see. Since Instagram is a mobile app that allows you to modify pictures that you have taken on a mobile device, it would only seem natural for Facebook to acquire this technology to make their interface even more user-friendly (especially since Instagram already has 30 million users).

This acquisition however has caused a lot of fuss because people are concerned that Facebook will take over the app and make it their own, however that is not the case. According to Matthew Panzarino, the News and Apple Editor of TheNextWeb.com, “The users get a better experience. Facebook gets more data. Users that are quitting Instagram because the service may be ‘ruined’ are barking up the wrong tree. Facebook sees the value in the network as it is, a photo creation machine with a lot of user love.”

Another concern that the Instagram users have is that they don’t want Facebook to have access to any more of their information. According to an articlefrom TheNextWeb.com on April 10, 2012, “FacebookCEO Mark Zuckerberg said that the company is flat-out interested in ‘buildingthe best experience for sharing photos with your friends and family.” Some say that this is just PR jargon, and that they still are worried about the security of their information… however to those people I say, if you don’t want people to have access to it, don’t post it on the web!